Authority of Truth - Long-held oral tradition alleges President Lincoln’s father was Abraham Enloe

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), the 16th president of the United States, was born Feb. 12, 1809, at Sinking Spring Farm in what was then Hardin County, Kentucky. Although accepted historical records identify Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln as his parents, alternative theories about Lincoln’s lineage—particularly the claim linking him to North Carolina’s Enloe family—have circulated for more than a century. Public domain

“All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother,” once said the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

For more than a century, that well-known devotion to Nancy Hanks Lincoln has been tied to a legend surrounding the 16th president and the claim that he was not the biological son of Thomas Lincoln, but rather the illegitimate child of a North Carolina man named Abraham Enloe.

The story traces most directly to James H. Cathey’s 1899 book, Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction; True Genesis of a Wonderful Man, later republished as The Genesis of Lincoln. In that work, Cathey argued that Lincoln had been born not in Kentucky, but in western North Carolina, the son of Abraham Enloe and Nancy Hanks, who he claimed had been a servant in the Enloe household.
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Cathey’s narrative, and the newspaper accounts that followed, offered a dramatic version of Lincoln’s origins. The Pensacola Journal, for example, summarized the claim that Lincoln “was born to (Nancy) Hanks around 1803, when she was a servant in the household of Abraham Enloe of Rutherford County,” adding that Enloe later sent Hanks and the child to Kentucky, where records show her marrying Thomas Lincoln in 1806.

The Arizona Republic similarly recounted versions of the tale in which Nancy Hanks was forced from the Enloe home after becoming pregnant, and in one telling was eventually “banished to Kentucky.”

By 1902, Cathey’s claims had spread far enough to be repeated in the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York, which quoted an elderly North Carolina resident, H. J. Beck, as recalling that his parents often spoke of “the episode of Abraham Enloe and Nancy Hanks.” Beck said the story in local memory was that Enloe had brought Nancy Hanks from Rutherford County, that she was later found to be pregnant, and that Enloe arranged for her removal.

Another recollection cited by Cathey came from Joseph A. Collins, who repeated a story attributed to Judge Gillmore that Nancy Hanks had a son before marrying Thomas Lincoln, whom Gillmore described as “a whiskey distiller, who was a poor man.”

Those are the kinds of colorful, scandal-laden details that have kept the Enloe story alive. But when weighed against the documentary record, the case begins to fall apart.

The most basic problem is chronology. The National Park Service states that Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks on June 12, 1806. Their first child, Sarah, was born on February 10, 1807. Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, at the Sinking Spring Farm in what was then Hardin County, Kentucky.

Lincoln himself, in his autobiographical sketch, wrote that Thomas Lincoln “married Nancy Hanks—mother of the present subject—in the year 1806.”

That sequence matters. It places Lincoln’s birth nearly three years after the marriage of Thomas and Nancy. To sustain the Enloe theory, one must either discard or radically reinterpret the accepted timeline of the Lincoln family—something mainstream Lincoln scholarship does not do. The National Park Service’s Lincoln birthplace chronology is straightforward and leaves no documentary opening for a secret North Carolina birth followed by later adoption into the Lincoln household.

The second major weakness in the Enloe legend is the portrayal of Thomas Lincoln. In the oral tradition repeated by Cathey and others, Thomas is sometimes reduced to a poor drifter or itinerant laborer who was paid to marry Nancy Hanks and assume responsibility for the child. But the available record paints a different picture.

National Park Service materials note that Thomas Lincoln purchased a 238-acre farm in 1803, and later property records show that he believed he had purchased a 300-acre farm as well (which became subject to boundary disputes). A park brochure for Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park states plainly that while the Lincolns’ life was sparse, they were “not poverty-stricken,” owning two farms, a lot in Elizabethtown, and livestock.

Thomas Lincoln was not merely a wandering poor man pulled in to cover a scandal. He was a farmer, property owner, and tradesman with standing in his community. That does not make him wealthy, but it does sharply undercut one of the Enloe story’s favorite characterizations.

Then there is Nancy Hanks herself. Standard references place her birth in Hampshire County, Virginia, now Mineral County, West Virginia, on February 5, 1784, and trace her later life into Kentucky, where she came to know Thomas Lincoln through the Berry family.

The National Park Service biography of Nancy Hanks Lincoln does not place her in North Carolina. Nor does a reference page on Abraham Lincoln Online, which states flatly that in the accepted record, “in no instance does he place Nancy Hanks Lincoln (or her parents) in North Carolina.”

The story passed down through generations of the Enloe family asserts Nancy Hanks somehow appeared hundreds of miles from her documented family home. Instead, the standard Lincoln record places Nancy Hanks in Virginia and Kentucky, not Rutherford County, North Carolina.

Even some newspaper coverage sympathetic to the Enloe story has acknowledged the weakness of the evidence. The Charlotte Observer wrote in 1992 that the rumors “are founded simply on a physical resemblance between Abraham Lincoln and Wesley Enloe, a son of Abram (sic) Enloe,” before adding, “The evidence of Abraham Lincoln’s legitimate birth is accurately recorded and fully accepted.”

The Enloe story remains interesting as folklore, as regional memory, and as an example of how oral tradition can harden into local identity. The Bostic Lincoln Center in North Carolina continues to preserve and interpret the tradition that Lincoln was the illegitimate son of Abraham Enloe.  

But folklore is not the same as proof. Modern DNA has occasionally been invoked as the tool that will settle the matter once and for all, yet no publicly documented, definitive DNA comparison has done so.

What the accepted documentary record already shows, however, is substantial enough: Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky in 1809, years after Thomas and Nancy married; Thomas Lincoln was not simply a poor itinerant stand-in; and standard biographical research places Nancy Hanks in Virginia and Kentucky, not North Carolina.

Cathey once wrote, “Every long-established and generally accepted tradition bears upon its face the authority of truth.”

Yet in the case of Lincoln’s lineage, tradition appears to have outrun the record. What survives is less a hidden genealogy than a revealing example of how legends grow around famous lives—especially when rumor, resemblance, and regional pride combine to challenge accepted history.
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Jeremy P. Ämick is author of the historical compilations “Moments on the Moreau” and “Beyond the Moreau.”       

Wesley M. Enloe, pictured here at age 81, was cited by writer James H. Cathey as bearing an “indefinable resemblance” to Abraham Lincoln. Cathey used the comparison in his 1899 book Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction to support his controversial claim that Lincoln was the illegitimate son of Abraham Enloe. Photo from “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction; True Genesis of a Wonderful Man.”